This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Saturday, November 17, 2012

"Lincoln": Mostly introspective drama about equality, human rights

Although the period-piece drama “Lincoln” is mostly backroom
morality play, there are some horrific images from the War Between the States
toward the end, as Steven Spielberg reaches back for the sort of narration he
produced in “Schindler’s List”. There’s
dump for severed male limbs that is particularly upsetting. Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) has to deal with
his distant wife’s Mary Todd (Sally Field) objection to their son Robert
(Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going to war himself, even as an officer. I recalled the long soliloquies in the 1995
Ted Turner marathon, “Gettysburg”, about fighting, dying, or worse getting
maimed (and still getting someone to love you) for a purpose or cause greater
than the self.

In the Civil War, you could certainly fight on the wrong
side. That is, if you were from the
South. The film focuses on the story of
President Lincoln’s pressing for passage of the 13th Amendment,
ending slavery. The problem, as he saw it, was that his Emancipation
Proclamation from 1863 had limited legal force (based on war powers), and that
he needed to get and win the House vote (on Tuesday, January 31, 1865) before
southern states were back in the Union. In any formulation, southerners faced expropriation
of property that they had thought was rightfully theirs by self-evident natural
truths. That all comes to a
philosophical head in a scene where Lincoln, with two young officers, talks
about Euclid’s axioms, that two things equal to something have to be equal to
each other.

Daniel Day-Lewis looks tall and haggard, as is appropriate
(Lincoln is said to have had Marfan’s Syndrome). That’s a far cry from how he was cast in the
1990s in “The Last of the Mohicans”. He
seems self-righteous. That seems to have
driven away his wife. There is one scene
where Lincoln bunks with young men. It’s
not clear if that means anything more than the lack of privacy common in the 19th
Century. Wikipedia weights in on the
subjecthere.

The level of technology in the 1860s is shown in detail. Already, the telegraph was a predecessor of today's email -- and the telegraph system had just survived the Carrington solar storm of 1859.

The film required most of Hollywood’s resources to produce
(although largely in Virginia).
Touchstone-Disney is the official US distributor. Production companies owning the copyrights
include Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox, as well as Participant
Media , Reliance, The Kennedy-Marshall Company, and Spielberg’s own Amblin
Entertainment. Post-production, a lot of
Warner Brothers facilities were used. I
guess any piracy will result in a lot of plaintiffs! The film was shot largely around Petersburg
and Richmond VA (it’s of interest to me, at least, that there is a major
production (New Millennium) studio in Petersburg VA., 50 miles from Colonial Williamsburg).

The film is widely shown in most multiplexes (starting Nov.
16), but at first it was marketed as an “independent art” movie, despite its
huge budget and multiple major studios involved in production and
distribution. It’s getting to be
necessary to be big now to even be in the festival and art movie market.

I saw it at the Regal Potomac Yards in Alexandria VA (to try
a different place), on a large screen in a large stadium with an almost
sold-out Saturday afternoon crowd. The projection did not seem to be
digital. I do recommend trying to see it
in a theater converted to extended digital projection (most large AMC
properties have it). The audience liked the movie; it did not "hold applause".

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